Flashing back two years ago to my freshman year at college, I had a programming course in my curriculum. It was an introductory course designed to teach students the fundamentals of programming which was taught in C++. I will walk you through the story of my first line of code ever that was the beginning of my career at programming.

The Dark Side Of “Hello World”

In my first programming lecture ever, I entered the classroom seeing a bunch of geeks wearing glasses, and at that moment I was thinking “what in the world am I doing here?” However, I pulled my self together and saw an empty desktop, and I sat down. I looked around and saw my teacher. She was a young lady in her mid-twenties and was recently graduated. A few minutes had gone by, and we had started to introduce each other. I realized that she is friendly, and you probably think that everything went fine and this is the end of the story, oh no no no!

Out of nowhere, she told us to turn on the computer and to prepare ourselves for a programming test — it was a shock. I felt like a lightning just struck me, and she told us to write a program that shows “Hello World” on the black screen. You have to finish it before the end of the period. At that time for the course material, we were using a TurboC compiler which was an old compiler that is programmed in DoS and requires an emulator to run the compiler. TurboC has a user interface color of blue and grey, without mentioning the black screen prison that logs the compiled code, and there isn’t even a mouse cursor to navigate.

I was freaking out, I didn’t know what to do. I was saying to myself self “how in the world would I do that.” I was thrown off, banging my head to the wall trying to solve it, and I was thinking that programming is hard and requires intelligent people to code! But I started to put more effort and time to understand and learn from each mistake I make. Soon I had started to solve problems more and more, and I was amazed by the emotional reward. I have started to have a different perspective on programming. I guess that writing code is not that hard after all.

My First Stack Overflow Question!

One day in the middle of the semester my teacher gave us a problem, and it was at the end of the week when she started to explain it. The bell rang, and it was the end of the period. Everyone one started to pack up and get ready to leave, but I decided to stay a little bit longer to work on the task.

I remember on that day, the problem was the only thing on my mind. I opened my laptop started digging through the problem trying to solve it. After two days of banging my head against the wall not being able to solve it, I have started Googling the problem. I discovered for the first time StackOverflow. I was amazed by it. I did not know that there is a community of programmers all over the world on one platform, so I wrote my first question at stack overflow. Guess what, it was terrible.

I have posted the entire code snippet in the comment section and everyone started to rage out as it was against the rules of StackOverflow. I have learnt from my mistakes. Multiple people suggested answers, but most of them were not that related to my question until one guy gave me pseudocode which was the key to solving the problem. Back then I was very happy with the solution.

The next day at school, it was the beginning of the week, and it was time to submit the solution to the problem. Surprisingly, I found out that I was the only one who solved it. It was one of the moments of life which I felt like I have achieved something special.

Now each time I look back at these memories, I feel nostalgic about how my passion for programming grew with me the motivation and driving force that keeps pushing me forward towards learning and discovering.

Originally published on Medium in February 2020